CALLICOON CENTER — On Thursday night, as the mist was beginning to fill the air, five Wiccan witches gathered to hold a seance on top of a mountain in an old, remote farmhouse in Sullivan County. They were there to channel the spirit of pop star Michael Jackson, who died in June.

Incense filled the air inside the house, and some of Jackson's favorite things — a plate of vegetarian Mexican food, a bowl of peanut M&M's and a glass of Perrier — had been carefully placed next to a picture of Jackson draped with a purple cloth.

In answer to the "Wizard of Oz" question, the witches present said they were good witches; none of them, they joked, had warts. They explained that Wicca was a federally recognized religion that worships Earth Mother and Sky Father, acknowledges the truths in other religions and is about love of nature.

Wiccans believe during Halloween the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. They also believe Halloween is the one time of year the dead can taste food.

Carol Bulzone, co-owner of the Broomstick, a magic supply store in Liberty, and owner of the magic store Enchantment in New York City, began by channeling energy through a sword — metal conducts energy, she explained later — in order to form a circle to ward off bad spirits. The witches then joined hands sitting at a table. Paula Forester, the other co- owner of the Broomstick, began to speak for Jackson. She said she was channelling him.

It’s a nice touch that they’re not all from horror movies, although I would have liked to see a few non-genre films included. The scariest place in all the movies I’ve ever seen is still the hallway to the Wizard’s chamber in The Wizard of Oz. Then there’s the bog in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the deck of the Black Pearl by moonlight in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark and not because of the snakes, the elevator in Three Days of the Condorbecause Redford has to share it with Max von Sydow, the canyon in Fort Apache, the view from outside the house on the top of Mt Rushmore and the cornfield in North By Northwest, the streets of New York City as the sun sets in I Am Legend, and the swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard.

That first view of the Death Star, by the way, isn’t scary. It’s kind of awesome, in fact. Now, the trash compactor…

Without making any excuses for the Quisling from Connecticut, you have to give Lieberman this. He does represent a state where there’s a large city that’s essentially an office park devoted to the Insurance Industry, Hartford, "America’s Filing Cabinet."

There’s an actual overlap between his corruption and his responsibility to represent his state’s interests. It makes sense that Connecticut wouldn’t mind having a Senator sympathetic to the Insurance Industry, just as it makes sense that Michigan would want their Senators to be sympathetic to the auto industry and Iowa would want theirs to be sympathetic to farmers. Connecticut doesn’t need to have one so deep in the insurance companies’ pockets, but that’s beside the point at the moment.

Indiana has any number of struggling factory towns, three large and highly regarded universities---Notre Dame, Purdue, and IU---and farms. Lots of farms.

Evan Bayh, the supposedly Democratic Senator from Indiana, learned a valuable lesson from last fall's election. Barack Obama won the Democratic primary in Indiana. Barack Obama carried Indiana in the Presidential election, the first time a Democrat has managed that in forever. Obama accomplished this mainly by bringing out the vote in the industrial Northwestern corner of the state and rallying younger voters and Independents. Bayh looked at this and decided that as a Democratic Senator from Indiana what he needs to do from here on out...

...is represent the interests of Republicans living and working on the East Coast.

As the debate over health-care reform intensifies, Bayh's wife is receiving lucrative payouts from some of the companies that could be most affected by that legislation.

Bayh contends the $2.1 million that his wife, Susan, earned from public health-care companies from 2006 to 2008 represents no conflict of interest. Questions persist, however, for at least two reasons. First, Evan Bayh has been unclear about his positions on many issues related to health-care reform. Second, there's the timing of Susan Bayh's rapid rise into corporate governance.

Susan Bayh, who was a midlevel lawyer for the politically active Eli Lilly and Co. while her husband was governor of Indiana, did not serve on the board of a single public health-care company until it was clear her husband was about to ascend to the U.S. Senate. Only one month before Evan Bayh was elected to the Senate in a landslide vote, his wife was appointed to serve on the board of what would become the nation's largest health insurance company -- and arguably the company with the most at stake in the health-care reform debate.

This is Evan Bayh himself, Alleged Democrat from Indiana, responding to the idea that his wife’s making millions as a board member for an insurance corporation influences his votes:

I can honestly tell you that if my wife did not have a job, none, I can't think of a single decision I've made that would be any different. I look at what's best for our state and our country and my own conscience. My integrity matters more to me than anything, so I always do what's right for the people who put their trust in me.

Always been a rule of thumb for me. Whenever someone starts bragging about his conscience and his integrity, it’s a good bet he has neither.

Bayh gets extra snake-oil salesman points for working the words “honestly” and “trust” into his pitch.

You know what, though. I believe him. If his wife didn’t have those jobs, I’m sure he’d be right out there with Lieberman aiding and abetting the Republicans because he’d have still worn the For Sale sign around his own neck and the insurance industry would have found another way to buy his soul.

Geez, no wonder the Zoloft isn’t doing the trick. Philosophy professor and boxing aficionado Gordon Marion writing in the New York Times on Soren Kierkegaard and the birth of the blues…whoops…sorry…on our being born into the blues:

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else.

Time for me to make another stab at reading Kierkegaard or should I just ask the doctor to increase the dosage? What if the someone else I want to be is my doctor? Then I could write the scrip for myself and treat my depression and my despair at the same time.

Everyone thinks it’s easy playing dumb. It’s not. To make a character dumb but real is exceedingly hard. The irony is you have to be incredibly smart to play dumb. You need expert timing, you need to really commit to the character, and you have to make us believe that the stupid things you say are not stupid to you. For my money, the two comediennes who played dumb to perfection were Judy Holliday and Gracie Allen. Both had IQ’s off the charts.

I think this part is key: “you have to make us believe that the stupid things you say are not stupid to you.”

Ken’s writing in praise of Shawnee Smith, suggesting she ranks up there with Holliday and Allen. Thing is, if you know who Shawnee Smith is these days you probably know her from her ability to survive from one Saw movie to the next.

Mannion threw himself forward and rolled through the doors just as the guards were pulling them closed. Safely outside, he held the statuette aloft. The little goddess’ golden skin glowed like fire in the rays of the setting sun. Mannion grinned as he imagined LeClerc’s frustration when he heard that this time he had not beaten Louisiana to the prize. But his moment of triumph was short-lived. It suddenly occurred to him. He turned to look sorrowfully at the now locked and barred doors.

I’ve noticed Joe Lieberman’s name and picture have been everywhere all day since he announced his maybe sort of maybe I will maybe I won’t it all depends on how righteous I feel that day intention to vote with the Republicans to filibuster any health care reform that includes a public option.

And I can’t help thinking that’s the point.

Not that he will help them filibuster or filibuster all on his own if he gets a mind to.

That his name and picture have been everywhere.

Joe Lieberman is the vainest politician in America. Everything has to be about him. This is the guy who came to national prominence because he thought the Impeachment Scandal was focused too much on Bill Clinton.

Look at his record. Whenever any political story goes on for a while he will find a way to work his name into the headlines. Give him enough ink and airtime and he will make sure that you’ll know that whatever you thought was at issue, the real story is what Joe Lieberman thinks about that issue or plans to do about it.

Uncle Merlin---also known around these parts as Dr Frigidaire---lost his dad yesterday.

Dick died of complications following a stroke back in August. He was 84.

I may need to clarify something. Uncle Merlin is not my uncle. He’s an uncle to the Mannion guys, Ken and Oliver. Their Uncle Merlin’s been like a brother to me since his mother Rosalie adopted me back in high school. I was something of a stray she found on the street and took in, and although Rosalie often did things that baffled Dick, on matters of people and their feelings he trusted to her judgment. So when I started showing up at their dinner table three and four nights a week, Dick never said a word about it except “Please pass the potatoes” and “Would you like some more spare ribs, Lance?”

I was already friends with Merlin, but things fell out this way. Every Saturday, spring of my junior year, I used to ride my bike out to my girlfriend’s house. Neither of us had a license yet. She lived across the river, not too far away, but it was uphill all the way back. Merlin’s house was at about the halfway point and on the return I would make a pit stop there. At the time, Merlin and Dick were rebuilding a 1958 Edsel together in their driveway. I’d hang around with them for a while, helping out when they needed an extra pair of hands. Mostly I held things while Dick or Merlin bolted them down or pounded them into place. After a bit, Rosalie would call me inside for a drink of juice and I’d visit with her. Next thing I’d know Dick would be announcing it was time for Merlin and I to go out and pick up the spare ribs, egg rolls, and won ton soup that we were going to have for dinner.

Even though I never did anything to help with the Edsel that amounted to real mechanical repair, I somehow picked up a lot from Dick, who was prone to lecture as he tinkered on the car. If I learned nothing else from my long acquaintance with him it was this. There is nothing around the house that can’t be fixed if you have the right tools and there’s never been a machine built that a human being can’t outwit.

I learned how to use the tools in my tool kit from Uncle Merlin, who of course learned what he knows about how to use tools from Dick. But the fact that I have a tool kit is due to Dick’s teachings.

He was quite an accomplished handyman. He was a more than competent electrician and carpenter. He was also a talented cabinetmaker. He fiddled around with gemstones for a time too and showed that if he’d had a mind to he could have been a jeweler as well. But these were hobbies.

Dick spent his career as a research scientist. There are more than eighty patents with his name on them. He ran his department at GE’s research lab. He had a Ph.D from MIT. You’re getting the point of this, right? He was an extremely intelligent man.

And he never showed it off. You knew it about him, instinctively, but it wasn’t because he’d made any point about letting you know.

Smart and accomplished as he was, he never lost his wonder and delight when introduced to a new technology, theory, or gadget. I remember one time when he and Rosalie were over at the Mannion house for dinner and Pop Mannion showed Dick a brand new device on the market at the time, a CD player. Dick sat next to it all the rest of the evening, a big boyish grin on his face, playing CD after CD and saying nothing except, “Wow!” and “This is incredible! Incredible!”

I have to tell you, I was never all that impressed by his brains or his accomplishments, because I grew up thinking that every father of his generation was brilliant and accomplished, far smarter and far more successful than their sons could ever hope to be. In short, I grew up thinking that we, the sons were born disappointments, or at least this one was and that’s why it was such a relief for me to be able to go over to Uncle Merlin’s house and sit and talk with Rosalie who made sure I knew that as long I was kind and honest and helpful I didn’t need to do anything else to impress her and I would never be a disappointment in her eyes.

And, like I said, when it came to people and their feelings, Dick took his cue from Rosalie.

Dick was a highly successful man who at a time when I was busy being highly unsuccessful never appeared to judge me. He kept his opinions about my perseverance in failure to himself. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard him express a personal opinion or judgment about another person. I’m not sure if it’s a lesson Dick intended or would have even approved of as a lesson but this is something else I learned from being around him. Keep your mouth shut about other people. Don’t judge them. Don’t expect them to do what you’d do in their situation or to be like you when they’re having a hard enough time just being themselves.

Of course, I think it suited him temperamentally to keep his opinions and feelings to himself and this was a source of frustration for Rosalie and Merlin.

Dick was one of the last of the generation of scientists for whom slide rules were second nature and reaching for one a reflex even after the introduction of computers into their labs. He was one of the last who went to work in white short sleeved shirts and narrow black ties and pocket protectors. Dick even smoked a pipe. He was still wearing that uniform long after other scientists of his vintage, like Pop Mannion, had changed into plaids and turtlenecks. The uniform expressed an attitude of cool rationality, of the importance of function over form, of objectivity always trumping subjectivity. By training Dick was inclined to think and speak in what he knew to be facts and hold back on what he believed ought to be true.

And he grew up on the plains of western Canada where I think he learned a very practical sense of detachment. Too much of nature is uncooperative, too much can go wrong to spend your time worrying about every little problem and mishap. In fact, it’s almost a waste of time to have feelings about troubles. You’re much better off just buckling down and solving what needs to be solved and fixing what needs to be fixed without getting in your own way by complaining about it. I have no idea if that’s how Dick really thought---he would never have talked about it---but it’s how he behaved. There was always a certain toughness about him, a stony aloofness, a quality Uncle Merlin likes to call “flintiness.” Dick was flinty.

When the blonde and I started dating, Rosalie adopted her immediately. Which meant that Dick did too. Sadly, Rosalie died the year before the first young man Mannion came along, but she left her heart behind for him and his brother and in lots of little ways she has managed to make them feel her love for them, usually working through their Uncle Merlin, but often working through Dick, who along with his second wife Alison, herself a flinty Canadian scientist, kept up a connection and a sincere interest in our family, his adopted family, over the years. Oliver still has the stuffed dinosaur Dick and Alison sent him when he was born and yesterday when Uncle Merlin told me Dick was gone I brought Dino downstairs and he’s sitting here in the chair in the living room across from me, apparently looking out the window and lost in thought---probably thinking flinty Canadian scientific thoughts.

After he retired from GE, Dick got involved in local conservation efforts. He began working on some theories about music and mathematics and taught himself how to play the keyboard and how to program his computer in order to follow up on those theories. He resumed his interest in gems. He and Alison travelled. And when I say travelled, I meant they travelled, they did not tour. They went places to get deep inside them and learn about them. They went to China and taught school there. They went to Iran, twice, and always planned to go back. They loved the Iranian people they met and made a point of getting to know. Here at home they hiked and they canoed and they went camping, in every season.

A few years ago, however, Dick’s body just broke down. Flinty and tough as he was, he couldn’t make it do what he would have liked it to do. It began sitting still a lot. He didn’t complain much, of course. But he didn’t like it. After a while of sitting still, it began to seem as though he’d actually outlived himself. I am not someone who will ever think that anyone else’s death can come as a blessing. I feel personally betrayed when anyone I know fails to live forever.

But I have to remember yet another thing I learned from Dick. How to be flinty when flintiness is called for. When there are things that need to be solved, you solve them. When there are things that need to be fixed, you fix them. But that’s when those things that need solving can be solved and those things that need fixing can be fixed, and sometimes they just can’t be. That doesn’t mean you start complaining. There are other problems to solve, other repairs that need to be made. Move on. I’d expect that would have been Dick’s advice to his doctors and nurses if he’d been in a condition to give it.

At any rate, we’re all trying to be flinty in his honor. Uncle Merlin’s doing his best. He sounds ok. I offered to come up to help him out in any way I could, you know, by holding things up while he bolts them down or pounds them into place, but in his own flinty fashion he’s ordered me to stay away.

He plans to come down here and collapse for a week or two when he and Alison have got things settled.

I want to wrap this up with my favorite story about Dick.

Once upon a time, he and Rosalie were on their way home from Boston where they’d visited Merlin at school and where Dick had taught some classes at MIT. Rosalie was driving and Dick was napping in the passenger seat. All of a sudden a cat dashed out onto the highway and Rosalie jerked the wheel to avoid subtracting one of its nine lives from however many it had left. Their car swerved off the road and onto the median which was soggy to the point of swampy from a recent rainstorm. The car buried itself in mud up to the windshield before it came to a stop, at which point Dick woke up.

He sat up in his seat, looked around, surveyed the scene, and then turned to his wife, who was sitting there bug-eyed and shaking, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, and asked her, quite calmly, “Rosalie, what are you doing?”

Incase your wondering about the title from last week preveiw it looks like a saw movie which I hate with out evening seeing the movies. Anyway I'm Oliver Mannion and I will be Live blogging Heroes tonight. Feel free to comment during the live blog if you can. Please. Don't worry about what to say just say your thoughts. And consider yourself at home!

8:01 Finally Matt and Sylar are Back! Yay!

8:02 HRG: You can't arrest him for over acting!

8:05 Of course! The kid just happens to have an aunt with the same name of the ice girl! Sure why not?

8:06 What about Will he was your friend.

8:08 Did I mention that you don't have to watch the show to comment?

8:10 This sorority is all kinds of weird.

8:11 Also the losers will die!

8:12 Oh so there wasn't an aunt Tracey.

8:13 Also I'm an over actor!

8:14 It smells that way because something did die in here. The other people from the Saw movies.

Couldn’t be helped. But last week the blonde and I were delighted, and relieved, when the guys vetoed Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen in favor of Little Big Man.

Oliver and Ken Mannion saw Transformers 2 in the theater over the summer. Twice, actually. I thought they’d enjoyed it, but it turns out they had been disappointed the first time and had only asked to go the second time in the hope that they’d been mistaken in their judgment on the first go round. I’ve mentioned that they’re developing more sophisticated critical skills, but hope can still trump experience.

But they had other reasons for choosing Little Big Man. The featured movie here the week before was The Comancheros starring John Wayne and they were in the mood for another western. They’ve both become Dustin Hoffman fans, having seen Tootsie recently. And they were curious to find out if my impression of Dustin Hoffman as both the young and the 121 year old Jack Crabb measured up.

They gave me two and a half stars. I lost half a star for not getting the dialog exact.

Their main reason, though, was they wanted to see just how crazy George Armstrong Custer was portrayed.

Both guys are history buffs. Their favorite class this year is American History. Oliver’s class was just moving from Reconstruction to the Indian wars, as it happened---Ken’s class is studying the Constitutional Convention---and his teacher had just given them an account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn making the point that Custer had gotten his command rubbed out through his vainglory, foolhardiness, and racist disrespect for the fighting spirit and skills of the Sioux and Cheyenne, the same point Ken remembered from his eighth grade history lesson on the Little Big Horn.

Their teachers apparently added that Custer himself deserved what he got for leading the massacre at Washita eight years before.

It’d been a long, long time since I’d seen Little Big Man. Long enough ago that I’d begun to feel like Jack Crabb himself whenever I talked about it.

“My name is Lance Mannion, and I am the oldest living survivor of an audience that saw a movie about the Battle of the Little Big Horn called…”

Movie holds up. In fact, it’s very good. But it turns out that the depiction of Custer and the Last Stand are two of the weakest parts. Richard Mulligan’s Custer is crazy, but it’s a cartoon crazy, without any nuance or grounding in the real Custer’s history or character. We’re meant to accept that Custer is nuts because only someone who was nuts would think and act as the movie has him thinking and acting. He’s out of his mind, because he must have been out of his mind. To the degree that there is any historical basis to his insanity it’s in his being the agent of the United States Government’s policy of genocide.

Considering that Little Big Man isn’t really about that policy or about the Indian Wars---it’s about how generally crazy life in these United States is and how crazy and violent human beings of all kinds are, and it’s key that the Cheyenne refer to themselves as the Human Beings because all of them, even Old Lodge Skins, are as nutty in their ways as whites---this essentially political depiction of Custer seems like a cheap and easy shot.

The movie was made in 1970, so I’m guessing that the director Arthur Penn and screenwriter Calder Willingham intended parallels to Vietnam---Washita as My Lai, for example---and then allowed themselves to think that the parallels substituted adequately for character and plot development. Custer is carried away by his own legend. He believes he is invincible and is convinced that his enemies are just as convinced of it. He persists in an obviously self-destructive course, rejecting all sane advice, without coming up with an exit strategy, because he knows that whatever he decides to do is the right thing to do and doing the right thing will always result in victory, no matter the odds or the obstacles. And when the end comes, he can’t fathom it. Defeat like this, at the hands of an inferior enemy---and all his enemies are his inferiors---is an impossibility and he goes stark raving mad, turning on his own troops and blaming everybody else, because he can’t face the truth. In those things, he is a reflection of the United States in Vietnam---and in Iraq, for that matter. The trouble is that there isn’t as much dramatic satisfaction in watching a political point being refuted, even through symbolic violence, as in watching a real tragic hero or villain meet his destiny.

Custer may have been mad. But if he was, he was mad in his own particular way. What he definitely was was ambitious and vain, and it was those two qualities that sent him charging down into the Greasy Grass. He disobeyed orders, refusing to wait for General Terry’s army to catch up with reinforcements, because he didn’t want to share the headlines with Terry, and he rejected his own scouts’ report on the number of warriors waiting for him because that fact didn’t jive with what he wanted and needed to think---that he was headed for a quick and easy victory. His plan was actually a sound one, if only there had been fewer Indians or many more cavalrymen. He wasn’t crazy, unless crazy is a synonym for all too human.

And I happen to know all this because I read the book.

Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man, is one of my all time favorites. I read it long before I saw the movie for the first time---like so many of the great movies of the 70s, I had to wait to see them until I was off to college and grad school where they showed up as parts of film fests on campus or at the local art houses. I was twenty or twenty-one when I saw the movie Little Big Man. I was fifteen when I read the book. It made an impression on me that I couldn’t shake when watching the film, then or last week.

In the novel, the possibility that Jack Crabb is a liar is continually raised by Crabb himself. And since he’s so old, we’re also meant to wonder if he’s maybe a bit senile. He could be telling a tall tale. He could be misremembering. He could be dreaming out loud. But Berger doesn’t want us to consider these possibilities so that we will simply accept what’s on the page as fiction. He’s not a game-player like John Barth, whose historical novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, is meant to be admired for its disregard for historical accuracy even when Barth is being accurate. Berger wants us to doubt Crabb’s narrative in order to make us test it against what we know or what we can look up. The joke on us isn’t, as with Barth, that it is all a joke. The joke is that when we do the testing we realize that what we think we know about the events and historical personages depicted in Little Big Men we “know” from movies and television shows that are lies or at best dreams dreamed on film.

Tested against what can be looked up in history books and historical documents, Jack Crabb’s stories come pretty close to the truth. Where they vary is in their personal nature.

Crabb’s version of things is slanted. He is biased in his judgments and in what he chooses to remember and in how he remembers it. He tells the stories he tells in the ways he tells them because what he’s relating is their effect on him. These things didn’t just happen. They happened to somebody. Jack Crabb. And that’s the only reason he knows about them. So when Crabb tells us that Wyatt Earp was a mean and nasty son of a bitch, he isn’t trying to make us reject whatever heroic image of Earp we might have from movies like My Darling Clementine. It’s simply that in their one and only encounter, Earp was mean and nasty to Jack Crabb.

If you look it up, which I did, you find out that that meanness and nastiness fits with what’s known of the real Wyatt Earp. It’s part of what made him an effective lawman. It’s not the whole truth about Earp. But it is a truth, part of the whole.

From an historian’s point of view, Crabb may be telling what amount to lies, but he doesn’t do it to a purpose. He does it because he can’t help seeing things from his own particular point of view. He can’t get outside himself. That’s what makes him such a perfect straight man to the various characters, historical and purely fictional, he encounters. He can only see them as they present themselves to a gullible audience, himself. That makes him an unreliable narrator, but a very different kind from Gore Vidal’s Aaron Burr, a consummate liar, who libels George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and every other historical character he deals with in order to make himself look good or, at any rate, not as rotten at heart as he knows we suspect he is.

By the way, Burr was another one of my favorite books from the period when I read Little Big Man. It just hasn’t kept as warm a place in my heart.

With Custer in the novel, it’s the same for Crabb as with Earp and Wild Bill Hickock. Crabb isn’t telling us the truth about the man, but he isn’t lying about him either. He is only telling us what he knows about Custer from his personal encounters with him. And what he knows is that there was something irresistible about George Custer. Crabb himself is infatuated with him from the first and he can’t shed his infatuation, not completely, at any rate, even after Custer causes the murder of his wife and infant son and Crabb resolves to kill him in revenge. It’s a love-hate relationship, but all on one side, because Custer hardly seems aware that Crabb is alive, at least not in the sense of having a life of his own apart from his place in the legend of George Armstrong Custer.

To Custer, everybody else, every thing else, exists only as an extension of his own ego. The truth about Custer---which is to say one of the truths about him---that Berger is getting at through Jack Crabb is that Custer was intensely charismatic and he had that ability charismatic leaders have of convincing other people to subsume their egos in his and to start seeing the world the way they do, as being all about and for them. Despite his own better judgment, despite what he knows, despite it being against his own interests, on some level, very close to the surface, Crabb can’t help rooting for Custer and taking a personal pride in the man’s success, even when it comes at the expense of Crabb and the people he loves. At the very end, when he knows better, after he’s watched Custer die and been glad to see him die, he is still Custer’s advocate and devoted admirer. He tries to tell his Cheyenne grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, that the Sioux and the Human Being warriors had left Custer’s body untouched and not taken his scalp out of respect.

But the now blind Old Lodge Skins tells him that respect wasn’t the reason Custer kept his hair.

“No, my son. I felt his head. He was getting bald.”

That’s a poignant moment because it brings up another quality of Custer’s, his vanity which is very much like the vanity of movie star whose looks are fading and is now facing the fact that his career as a romantic lead are coming to an end. Custer was a golden boy who had reason to worry he’d outlived his days of youthful glory. Whatever else drove him to his doom at Little Big Horn, part of what he was doing was attempting to recapture his sense of himself as a hero of the Civil War, now more than ten years in the past.

That gives Berger’s Custer a tragic dimension that the character doesn’t have in the movie at the end of which he’s acting as crazy as the Mannion boys expected but he’s a crazy clown and his death causes not much more than an ironic shrug.

The other big weakness of the movie is the Mrs Pendrake subplot. Even in the novel, Mrs Pendrake is a minor character, but her short, swift harlot’s non-progress in the movie from hypocritical preacher’s wife to hypocritical whore doesn’t add anything to her part. It just reduces her from a sketch of a Madame Bovary of the Wild West to a borderline misogynistic cliche that doesn’t even make the satirical point that there are different ways of being a prostitute, since she’s shown going in the wrong direction for that.

It doesn’t help that she’s played by Faye Dunaway, whose presence as the only other movie star besides Dustin Hoffman in the cast gives a weight to the character she can’t carry. Mrs Pendrake collapses into nothing and we’re left with the sight of a talented but bored actress amusing herself by playing dress-up and trying out a Southern belle accent as if she’s preparing to audition for the part of Blanche DuBois in a touring company production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Plus, and this may just be me, but it’s hard to see how anyone, even a teenage boy who’d spent half his life among the Indians, could mistake Bonnie Parker-Milady de Winter-Mrs Mulray for a mother figure and an ideal of feminine virtue.

Other than that, Hoffman is at his most likeable and he’s doing something I can’t recall seeing him do again until Tootsie and then not again until Stranger Than Fiction, having fun playing the part. The movie is punctuated throughout by fine cameo turns by some excellent character actors, most noticeably Jeff Corey as a temperamentally mild Wild Bill Hickock and Martin Balsam as a relentlessly optimistic snake-oil salesman who cheerfully sacrifices pieces of himself---a hand, an eye, a leg---as just the price of doing business, but also Alan Oppenheimer as Custer’s second in command at Little Big Horn hopelessly offering the last bit of sane advice Custer will ever reject, William Hickey as the fussy and pedantic historian who interviews the ancient Jack Crabb, and Carole Androsky as Jack’s gunslinging sister Caroline, a part that should have been much more than a cameo.

As good as they all are, though, the movie doesn’t belong to any of them, not even to Hoffman. It belongs to Chief Dan George who plays Jack Crabb’s Cheyenne grandfather, Old Lodge Skins.

___________________

An historical aside: Not coincidentally, we’ve started watching Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War. The guys got a kick out of Custer’s first appearance in which we learn that Custer graduated last in his class at West Point and that the first things he did after war was declared was have himself fitted with a fancy tailor-made new uniform then have himself photographed showing it off.

_________________

Your turn: My real disappointment with the movie Little Big Man is that it leaves out some of my favorite scenes from the book Little Big Man, like the one with Wyatt Earp. This isn’t just another case of “The book is better than the movie.” The movie could have benefited from the addition of characters. It’s meant to be a revisionist anti-epic, but even as an anti-epic the screen needs to be a little more crowded. Earp, Calamity Jane, Jack and Caroline’s no good brother Bill, Jack’s “niece” Amelia are all I think sorely missed. But even though it isn’t just a case of “The book is better than the movie,” it is the case that the book is better than the movie because the book happens to be one of the best American novels of the last half of the 20th Century.

I’ll leave it to the college professors to sort out which Roths, which Updikes, which Vonneguts, which Morrisons and Mailers, if any, and which novels by Saul Bellows belong on the list, but that list has to include Little Big Man.

Heard this one? Real knee-slapper. Report appears on the web back in August. Blogger posts that Time Magazine’s Joe Klein had dug up Barack Obama’s senior thesis from his Columbia U days in which young Barry the radical and secret Muslim extremist argued that the United States Constitution is inherently flawed.

A political science major, Obama was seen as a top student, according to his classmates. Professors even asked the young student to lecture several times. Obama was required to write a 'senior seminar' paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, "plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government."

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: "I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh."

In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: "There are many who will defend the 'free market.' But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny."

However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: "... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

There it is. Obama hates America and always has.

The post has a tag that identifies it as satire. But it’s a Right Wing Blog and the Right Wing’s definition of humor has been set by Ann Coulter--- joke. 1. noun. an outrageous lie you got caught telling. 2. alt. a vile insult or an expression of a vicious belief or desire that offends most of the rest of polite society and therefore puts your career and future invitations to appear on Sunday morning talk shows at risk. e.g. It was just a joke! What’s the matter with you? You don’t have a sense of humor?

In short, the blogger may have thought he was being funny, but he wasn’t being funny by satirizing his fellow Right Wingers’ fear and loathing of the President or their paranoid willingness to believe he’s out to destroy their America. He was just trying to find a more clever way of expressing that fear and loathing and paranoia and give himself cover in case he was ever called on it.

Which means I believe he’s probably tickled by what’s happened.

The post was picked up on by other Right Wing bloggers who, true to form, didn’t get the joke. They treated it as fact because it was the only kind of fact they can get their minds around---“facts” are things that confirm everything they already know and don’t really need in order to continue knowing it. In a way, their facts are like their jokes, linguistic Swiss Army Knives with a tool for every purpose when telling lies and spewing prejudices.

Took a little time, but as these things have a way of doing, the “news” percolated upwards from the blogs to the attention of the mainstream Right Wing noise-makers.

Ledeen has admitted he was fooled and apologized. I haven’t heard if Dobbs' has said anything. I don’t care what any of the Right Wing bloggers have said because they won’t learn a lesson from this. They won’t even see that there’s a lesson to learn. They’ll fall for something like it again, soon, and when that happens they won’t be embarrassed and they won’t acknowledge that there was any again about it. Those who will admit that that they’d been fooled before will simply compare their mistake to detectives following the wrong lead for a little bit on their way to discovering the final clue that proves their case and traps the criminal they’ve known to be guilty from the start. The rest won’t even remember having been ever been wrong before, because all that’s real to them is their hatreds and fears and what they’ll remember is the feeling of having had those hatreds and fears confirmed.

This has become so routine that it’s tempting not to bother to notice, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered except that I got slapped in the face by this post on Yahoo’s Buzz Log when I scrolled over it on my way to checking my mail this morning.

Ok, it’s Buzz Log. As a platform for keeping track of what’s going on in the world, it’s the antithesis of profound, deep, thoughtful, insightful, pertinent, informative, and, well, intelligent. But I would bet that far more people get their sense of what’s happening that matters than those who follow the news through even the top political blogs. So, in case any of that majority of web browsers stumbles this way, please be advised.

Rush Limbaugh did not get punked.

That blogger wasn’t trying to punk anybody---and by the way, Buzz is wrong. That’s not a humor blog. It’s a run of the mill outlet for the Right Wing Noise Machine. (Wow, Barack Obama is more unpopular than George W. Bush? I wouldn’t have guessed. Thanks for speaking truth to power, guy.) And like I said, I’m pretty sure the intention was to tell a lie without having to take responsibility for lying.

But Limbaugh didn’t get punked, no matter what. To have been punked you have to feel like a punk afterward. You have to care that you fell for the joke. You have to care that you were wrong.

Limbaugh doesn’t care.

He didn’t care.

It didn’t matter to him whether or not the story about the President’s thesis was true. That sort of truth doesn’t matter to him. The only truth he cares about is what his listeners accept as the truth, which is that they are right to hate what they hate and fear what they fear and get angry at whatever they’re angry about---and that’s usually what Rush himself has told them they should hate and fear and get angry about it.

When it turned out he’d passed along yet another lie to his listeners, Limbaugh didn’t apologize. He shrugged it off.

As the writer for Buzz herself reports, Limbaugh “defended himself by saying basically the thesis felt true.”

That feeling is key. That feeling matters more to Limbaugh and his dittoheads than any truth. For them, that feeling is the only truth.

The reason the blogger thought he could get away with that post, the reason those other bloggers swallowed it whole without thinking, and the reason it made it to Ledeen’s and Limbaugh’s and Dobbs’ desk, which is the same reason that another variation of the same “joke” will follow the same path soon and another one will follow right after that.

There are a lot of people in the United States that believe that the President is their enemy.

They hate him and they are afraid of him.

And that hatred and fear is dangerous.

The truth is that Barack Obama is less popular ten months into his Presidency than George W. Bush was ten months into his, but it’s because Democrats and Liberals were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, they wished him well and they wanted him to succeed for the sake of the country.

That spirit---that patriotism---is absent from a large number of people on the Right at the moment.

They are convinced that the President is trying to destroy America and they don’t just want him to fail at that, they believe that he must be stopped.

At any and all cost.

The Buzz writer says, “Let's hope someone kept their sense of humor in all this.”

Lance Mannion drove out into the gloom and damp to fetch bagels for his family, and he did not hole up at the bagel place to take advantage of the free WiFi for an hour as his wife feared he would, but came straight back home. He's that kind of husband and dad. A parade in his honor is being discussed.

Other night I took Oliver Mannion up to church for a presentation he had to attend as part of the preparation for his Confirmation this coming spring. The presentation was supposed to be on “human sexuality” and the Church’s teachings about what to do if you find yourself afflicted with it as you enter your high school years. If it had been anything like the one I had to attend with Oliver’s brother when he was getting ready for his Confirmation it would have been a fairly innocuous but interesting exercise in implied heresy in which the views of our homophobic Pope--- “Welcome all ye haters of gay people and women clergy fleeing the Episcopal Church because you’re afraid of getting cooties!”---and the other protectors of the child molesters nominally in charge were generally ignored in favor of lessons all with the same unspoken moral:

“Please don’t do it before you get married, but for God’s sake if you’re going to do it, don’t do it with creeps and use protection and get tested!”

I wonder how many parishes there are in the United States like ours that are in passive-aggressive rebellion against Rome.

But when Oliver and I got there we found out that the presentation had been cancelled. The nun who runs the religious education program told us that the woman who leads these seminars wasn’t up to it tonight.

SEDONA, Ariz. — Midway through a two-hour sweat lodge ceremony intended to be a rebirthing experience, participants say, some people began to fall desperately ill from the heat, even as their leader, James Arthur Ray, a nationally known New Age guru, urged them to press on.

“There were people throwing up everywhere,” said Dr. Beverley Bunn, 43, an orthodontist from Texas, who said she struggled to remain conscious in the sweat lodge, a makeshift structure covered with blankets and plastic and heated with fiery rocks.

Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray told the more than 50 people jammed into the small structure — people who had just completed a 36-hour “vision quest” in which they fasted alone in the desert — that vomiting “was good for you, that you are purging what your body doesn’t want, what it doesn’t need.” But by the end of the ordeal on Oct. 8, emergency crews had taken 21 people to hospitals. Three have since died.

The nun, Sister P., was friends with the mother. She knew the daughter well. She went to the wake. And she was clearly still upset herself. Sister P. is mild-mannered and cheerful but she has a touch of that iron and fire I remember from my grade school days and that kept me on my toes in classrooms of even the most good-natured of the Sisters of the Presentation who taught us. Sister P. was trying to focus on her friend’s loss and not on what caused it. But underneath she was as angry as she was sad, and her anger kept slipping out, mainly in the quotation marks she put around the word she used for James Arthur Ray, the self-help quack who ran the retreat, charging something over nine grand a pop, where the daughter died.

“Guru.”

For Sister P., “guru,” at least when applied to Ray, is a too polite euphemism for what he really is.

I’d say the quotation marks are appropriate, based on this lede from a profile of Ray in the Arizona Republic:

Even as a boy, James Arthur Ray was fixated on money and spirituality.

Amazing, isn’t it, how many people over the centuries have made that same connection and how many others have fallen for the pitches of those who made the connection? From the dawn of human consciousness, when people became aware that they were going to die and didn’t like the idea, there have always been “gurus,” and priests and preachers, shamans, wizards, oracles, spiritual “advisors,” and self-help “experts,” who’ve seen the quest for enlightenment and the search for heaven as a opportunity to make a fast buck.

Sister P. was angry at how much Ray had charged for the privilege of risking multiple organ failure in his sweat lodges. It’s been reported to have been upwards of nine but Sister P,who would know, said it was closer to ten.

“They paid ten thousand dollars to die!”

Besides the fact that Ray had killed her friend’s daughter through his greed and carelessness---and, by the way, according to Sister P, those people went into that sweat lodge after thirty-six hours of severe fasting---Sister P was angry for another reason. She thought Ray’s retreats and sweat lodges made a mockery of authentic Native American religious practices and beliefs.

Sister told us that she has always wanted to try out a sweat lodge herself.

Which to me suggested that Sister P has something in common with her friend’s daughter. Sister P is also a seeker.

A seeker---that’s the word Sister used to describe her friend’s daughter. She did not put any quotation marks around it.

I liked that. Sister defined a seeker as someone who spends her life asking questions and looking for answers, someone who has essentially made a career of wandering around the world and through life wanting to know “What are we here for? What is our purpose? Why does it all matter?”

“Teacher, what must I do to be saved?”

Thinking about it, I realized that I’ve known a number of seekers like that. Seeker isn’t the word I’d have used though. Not without quotation marks that implied it was a polite euphemism. But now I think that would have been a mistake, that in fact I have been mistaken about the seekers I have known or at least about some of them.

Sister P, naturally, appeared to believe that her friend’s daughter, the seeker, could have found the answers to all her questions within Christianity, if not within the Catholic Church.

But although the daughter followed her own path that led her into that “guru’s” sweat lodge, that didn’t lessen Sister’s P’s respect for her vocation.

That’s how it sounded to me Sister saw it. Being a seeker is a vocation, a job God calls some of us to do, like an artist, a doctor, a teacher…or a nun.

I like that.

“Come, follow me,” Jesus told the rich young man, the Gospels’ most famous seeker. I’ve always thought that the best contemporary translation for that is “Come, find me.”

Tucked into stunning red rock formations and canyons punctuated with splashes of green junipers, this town of about 11,500 has long been a high-end golf and tennis resort, the choice location for second homes of the well-to-do and a favorite destination for hikers, rock climbers, cyclists and sightseers.

It has also become world-renowned as a New Age metaphysical center, attracting seekers and followers of an assortment of spiritual pathways, many of whom believe healing energy is released from “vortexes” that are said to be scattered among the rock formations.

Scores of self-proclaimed mystics, healers, channelers of past life experiences (and aliens), sacred touch massage therapists, wind whisperers and vision quest guides offer their services, often for a hefty price. Many of these spiritual pathways are based somewhat loosely around Native American traditions, including the ceremonial sweat lodge.

But the deaths of two people in a sweat lodge last week at Angel Valley, a New Age spiritual retreat about six miles south of West Sedona, is causing more soul-searching among New Age practitioners and concern among town leaders.

Can somebody tell us what these Republican leaders Politico’s suggesting want to take the Party back from the Right Wing Tea Party types and Fox Newswatchers and Rush’s Dittoheads believe, think, or want that’s at all different from what the Right Wing Tea Party types and Fox Newswatchers and Rush’s Dittoheads believe, think, or want?

I shouldn’t bother to write about this, but it’s either a Marge Simpson gets naked for Playboy post or a Miss Farrell doesn’t get naked on Mad Men post, and my brother Luke Mannion has already warned me I write too much about Mad Men.

The idea that beneath her tubular dresses Marge Simpson is concealing the body of a centerfold is like the idea that if you removed the crayon from his brain Homer would revert to his true self, his mother’s son, a heroic and altruistic genius---it’s a joke behind the joke, not funny in itself but it gives a twist to conceits that might have grown tired without that twist. The crayon explains everything about Homer. Whenever he takes his cheerfully clueless and utterly destructive idiocy to a new level or whenever the opposite happens and he says or does something intelligent, noble, and moral, we know that the crayon has shifted.

In The Simpsons Movie, asked what fool thing he’s up to this time, Homer replies, “Risking my life for people hate for reasons I don’t quite understand.” But we understand. The real Homer Simpson, hero-at-large, is leaking out around the powder blue Crayola.

Everything about Marge Simpson as a woman would seem to be summed up in that stovepipe hairdo. Marge, apparently tall and rigid, perpendicular to the extreme, can be seen as literally the straight woman to Homer’s doughy, well-rounded, squishily undefined blob of rolling appetite and id. Homer has no boundaries. He expands to fill whatever space he’s given. Marge is as straight and plumb and as unbudgeable as a bar on a cell door. She is the line that Homer should never cross.

But what if that hair isn’t a continuation of the stove pipe? What if it’s the smoke rising up from the hot oven blazing away inside?

What if the joke isn’t how it looks but how she thinks it looks? What if Marge sees her hair as what I’m suggesting it symbolizes, an expression of her sexiness?

Sex is one of the few aspects of human life The Simpsons generally shies away from. I haven’t watched every single episode so I’ve probably missed a few that undermine my point, but based on what I have seen, I think the writers know better. They know their own creation. They know they can’t approach sex unless they do it in the same Rabelaisian spirit with which they tackle everything else. The fundamental premise of the humor on The Simpsons is that Homer is not an aberration or a monster or mutant or even an original. He is just everybody else in Springfield writ large. People are funny because they are like Homer, foolish, stupid, greedy, gluttonous, and, well, kind of disgusting.

This is fine if the joke about a character stuffing himself with donuts or guzzling beer. It’s fine if the joke is about the excretory bodily functions. It’s fine if the point of the joke is to puncture egos, reveal vanities, deflate the pompous, and make fools of the pretentious and self-deluded. It can be good to be reminded that people are at their most basic herds of dumb animals blundering from one water hole to the next, driven by appetites and needs more than by anything resembling real thought, let alone idealism or noble dreams.

But it’s not the way a liberal and enlightened audience wants to see sex.

We don’t mind seeing ourselves being made to look like hypocritical or superstitious fools at prayer. But we don’t want to see ourselves being made to look foolish in bed.

We can tolerate the suggestion that we’re disgusting to watch when we’re eating spaghetti or slurping soup. We would recoil in horror to have to see ourselves portrayed as ugly and ridiculous, as no sexier or soulful or romantic than rutting pigs, when we’re naked and in a lover’s embrace.

I’m not saying this isn’t or shouldn’t ever be done. It’s pretty much the rule on Family Guy where all sex is treated as ridiculous and as basically an expression of insanity to the point that the idea that Brian, the family dog, and Lois Griffin could become romantically involved is passed off as a reason to sympathize with Brian. The poor dog is carrying a torch for his mistress and the only reason his love goes unrequited is that Lois is foolishly loyal to her undeserving human husband.

Sex with Brian is out for Lois because it would be adulterous. She appears to have no qualms about bestiality, and why should she, considering the way the show portrays all its human male characters?

But on The Simpsons, sex isn’t disgusting and can’t be, because, as foolish, selfish, stupid, and amoral as Homer and Bart and other characters can be, they all have one redeeming quality. They can and do love.

I don’t want to make this post an exercise in compare and contrast between The Simpsons and Family Guy, but on Family Guy love exists as a device either to start a plot or wrap it up. But really at the heart of show, to the degree that it has a heart, hate and contempt hold far more sway. Such love as exists is twisted by jealousy and lust. Stewie hates his mother. Brain hates Peter. Chris hates Meg. And Meg hates everybody, herself included and most of all. The Simpsons, however, truly love each other, a fact that often surprises, dismays, and upsets Bart and Lisa. On Family Guy, Lois holds the family together by being the object of everybody’s desire. Well, maybe Meg is immune, which would explain why she’s the one who’s always odd-person out. Marge, however, holds her family together by loving them all and demanding that they love each other.

Which brings us to the question of Marge’s hidden sexuality.

The Simpsons routinely hints---hints, hell. It regularly shows---that Marge and Homer were and, when they get the chance, still are a very frisky couple. Together they are hot stuff. But their hotness isn’t due to Homer’s being a secret stud or to Marge’s having the body of a nineteen year old swimsuit model. They’re hot together because they want to be together. They love each other. Theirs isn’t one of the great love stories of our time, but it is a love story.

It doesn’t matter what Marge looks like naked. What matters is what Homer sees when he looks at her, however she is dressed or undressed, and that’s the girl of his dreams.

His dreams.

Not our dreams.

And certainly not the dreams of the readers of Playboy, who won’t look at Marge’s “photos” anyway, because they only read Playboy for the articles.

The fact is that Marge can’t look like a centerfold. Because she can’t look human.

The Simpsons live on their own alien planet and are drawn accordingly. The characters are not even caricatures of human beings, even the ones who are caricatures of the guest stars providing their voices. The animators have created beings that are anthropoid-like but not exactly humanoid. They don’t have heads, faces, hands, hair, skin or muscle structures like ours, so the females among them probably don’t have tits and asses like Playboy Playmates.

To put it another way, they’re cartoons. Cartoons aren’t sexy.

Ok, I know that there are people who enjoy looking at pornographic images of their cartoon favorites. There are whole websites devoted to this peculiar taste, and before you sneer, remember that there are intellectuals, college professors even, who fantasize about Mr Darcy and write “stories” about their favorite characters on Lost. Judge not, yada yada yada. If you really want to see Marge Simpson naked you don’t need to shell out the bucks to buy Playboy. Google her up. And what you’ll find is that Marge Simpson naked doesn’t look like Marge Simpson.

Yes, I’ve looked. What do you think, I spend all my time on the web reading economics blogs and following the links from Atrios?

Looking at drawings of Marge Simpson with upturned breasts that float and a round rear end so firm you can crack an egg on it will actually make you go blind. That is, your eyes will not be able to make sense of the images and will have no choice but to reject them. They’ll try to take it in, but they’ll think, What the hell is this? It can’t be a drawing of an actual human female, not with that hairdo, that face, and that skin color, but it can’t be Marge Simpson, not with those breasts, that ass, and those legs, and not posed like that! Since it can’t be one or the other, it must be neither and what’s neither is nothing but lines and colors and not worth resolving, let’s look at something else.

Meanwhile, pornographic images of Lois Griffin and the other characters from Family Guy can look like actual out-takes from the show to the point that you might ask yourself just which episode had Lois and Meg doing that? That’s because Family Guy is in spirit and style borderline pornographic itself and most of the characters have been depicted naked at one time or another, but also because the drawing style is more of a mish-mash than The Simpsons and caricatures of real human beings appear often and those caricatures are not too much of a departure from the style in which the regular characters are drawn with the result that the regular characters pass for caricatures of real human beings too and Lois Griffin naked can look like herself and like the lingerie model she’s worked as sometimes.

Now! I’m not confessing to having erotic thoughts about Lois Griffin. I will admit to having erotic thoughts about fortysomething wives who don’t mind being photographed in their underwear, and that’s the point here. Lois Griffin is drawn in a way meant to remind us of a real human being. As a drawing she isn’t sexy, but if you could bring her to life the human being that resembled her would be. Bring Marge Simpson to life and you’d have…a cartoon character walking around. You’d feel like Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as opposed to Marge becoming like Kim Bassinger in Cool World or Amy Adams in Enchanted.

And by the way I don’t mean you’d feel like Bob Hoskins around Jessica Rabbit. I mean like Bob Hoskins trying to ride in the cartoon taxi or taking the elevator in Toontown.

Ok, this has been a long way to go to say that I don’t think I’ll bother to pick up the November issue of Playboy. But I won’t think less of you if you do. I’ll just assume you’re a Simpson fan who got curious.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with you if you’re looking for something else from Marge’s photo spread. Personally, I don’t get a thrill out of looking at naked pictures of cartoon characters, but that’s a matter of taste. Paintings and drawings of nudes can be very erotic, even more erotic than photographs, but they aren’t any more real than cartoons. Their effect is in how effectively they remind you of a real human body. I can’t help wondering about the artist’s model, and since there are probably no actual models behind most cartoons that particular erotic charge is missing for me.

But if Betty Rubble reminds you of your tenth grade English teacher or Kim Possible looks to you like the girl you would have taken to the prom if only that guy who looked like Race Bannon hadn’t asked her first…well…

__________________

Ok, I’ll play if you will. Betty, but not Vernoica, unless it’s with Betty. Jimmy Newtron’s mom. Jane and Judy Jetson, but not together because that’s just sick. Raven, but not Starfire. Starfire’s sister, though. Maybe Dapne, because she’s a redhead, and definitely Velma, because who knows what lush delights await under that turtleneck? And, of course, Mrs Incredible!

Your turn.

_________________

Related even though nobody gets naked: At the New Republic, John McWhorter doesn’t find much funny in the Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show.